#2790: Margaret Dunkle

Margaret Dunkle is a Lead Research Scientist at the George Washington School of Public Health’s Department of Health Policy, author and a Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame laureate for her work as “an author, activist, and unsung heroine of Title IX”.

 

More importantly, Dunkle is a completely unhinged conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine activist, who, according to herself, has “a family member who is vaccine-injured”. Given her public status, however, she gets to publish her conspiracy theories in outlets that have the potential to reach a rather large number of people, and her 2011 piece in the Baltimore Sun, “We don’t know enough about childhood vaccines [we really do]: Are 36 doses of vaccine by age 2 too much [it isn’t], too little, or just right?”, is telling enough. In the piece, Dunkle regurgitates a range of anti-vaccine talking points you could instead locate on the websites of familiar anti-vaccine conspiracy cults such as NVIC or SafeMinds. After complaining that “debates” over vaccines are often “fact-free” because most people fail to know even “[h]ow many immunizations does the federal government recommend for every child during the first two years of life,” Dunkle says that the number is “36”, which is false unless you engage in some deliberately deceptive anti-vaccine counting exercise. Then she cites GayleDeLong’s execrable pseudoscientific data-mining to claim that there is a correlation between vaccine uptake and the prevalence of autism spectrum disorders. There really, really isn’t.

 

Apart from references to garbage pseudo-studies, Dunkle employs a range of standard anti-vaccine tropes, including “too many, too soon” nonsense and complaints about vaccine ingredients, in particular aluminum, which, contrary to anti-vaccine mythology, is safe. Indeed, Dunkle is not afraid of using toxins gambits, especially with regard to thimerosal and formaldehyde, a normal byproduct of human metabolism. Dunkle points out that thimerosal “is 49.6 percent mercury”, but being chemically illiterate (and/or dishonest), she fails to note some rather crucial distinctions.

 

Diagnosis: Unhinged conspiracy theorist and denialist, and regardless of her social standing and position: her nonsense and lunacy on vaccines demonstrates that she is unlikely to be trustworthy or worth listening to about anything whatsoever.

 

Hat-tip: David Gorski @ SciencebasedMedicine